22
by starry34
Summary: Jenny's little black book is Gossip Girl's goldmine. Little J is destroying herself over him. Jenny/Nate oneshot. Some Chuck/Blair. AU.


**A/N: This is greatly AU. I reference some canon events, but it follows no logical timeline with the TV series. No idea about the books; I haven't read them. Probably a bit blasphemous there but c'est la vie.**

Disclaimer: I don't own Gossip Girl. (Duh?)

* * *

_If people are so different, how does anyone understand?_

Jenny's tally was the most impressive yet, but it was the drastic, gone-too-far nature of it that threw them. Jenny was known to toe the line, step over the line, redraw it completely even, but nobody had realised quite to what extent she was willing to go to get what she wanted.

Lily would have sacrificed the Bass fortune to have kept the six small sheets of notebook paper bearing names (and an utterly similar quality to the ones she'd once hidden from Rufus) as far from Gossip Girl as possible.

But things just didn't work that way in the Upper East Side, especially not when the one under fire was the same one that had foolishly slept with Blair Waldorf's . . . anything.

So on Christmas Eve, Jenny wasn't surprised when the message came.

The Humphrey-Vanderwoodsen-Bass family was.

_Move over, S, Little J's putting her money where her mouth is. She might be just a poor girl from Brooklyn, but she can afford to gamble with your rep as long as she keeps these sugar daddies behind her. Better keep your dealer on speed dial, Little J. You never know when you're going to need a hit... or when you're going to get one.  
xoxo  
Gossip Girl_

And then there was the list.

_December.  
_100 tabs of x  
3 AA batteries  
2 jumbo packs of condoms  
6 bottles of Grey Goose

And then there were names and names and names, and at the end of the list there was Nate.

Vanessa thought she should have been more hurt. Strangely, all she felt was... a strange sort of compassion. Part of her wanted to ask why, but she didn't, because somewhere inside she understood it. Serena was the promiscuous one; Serena was the one Dan wanted most, and if Vanessa had been younger and not so much think-first-then-act, it might have been her own name in that blast instead of Jenny's.

But that list...

It was unequivocal.

And there were 22 (23? she'd forgotten) names on it, and they'd all heard Jenny telling Nate she loved him at that holiday... celebration. While drunk, check. Hungover, check. And sober, well, the list confirmed she'd been high most of the month. Most of them were in unspoken concordance that what Jenny really loved was her dealer, and anything else was just ecstasy.

Even empathetic Vanessa thought that was pretty easy to buy – the theory, not the drug. (Jenny insisted X was only as hard to get as the buyer.) But 22...

22's such an ostentatious number that Vaness wonders if you could get _22_ if it was just about pills and pleasure; she doesn't think so. 22's a number of desperation. But Jenny doesn't need credentials; she's got Chuck Bass in her little black book and that counts for two because of Blair. Maybe she's sadder than they've thought. Vanessa's starting to wonder.

Jenny wants them to think, maybe for affirmation for herself, that 22 is about sex, just sex, and grandiosity. Vanessa doesn't believe it; really, neither does Jenny, but Vanessa's wrong because there are 23 names on the list, and that changes everything.

22 are about loneliness, and 23, the last, is different, because she loves him. And that's why she has the other 22; they're the best she has to compensate when the feeling's not mutual.

* * *

Once the blast went out, it was not really a mystery to anyone why Nate wanted to get as far away from the rest of them as physically possible for the holidays. There was that, and his mother, who had announced very firmly that she was in need of a change of climate.

Siberia was a rather unconventional solution, but of course Anne had friends there; Vanderbilts had friends everywhere.

Nate said it meant a lot of skiing.

Blair said it meant cheese and commies and not getting laid for two weeks, but that bit of it was just her humour.

"Vodka," Nate supplemented.

That, at least, was accurate.

As it turned out, Anne's friends were raging liqueur fanatics who were seldom sober enough to carry on polite conversation. Nate knew this; he also knew that Anne was overly fond of imported Christmas ales and after a certain point her very existence was questionable.

Anybody who said the rich didn't get sloppy drunk didn't realise that society was being paid off to label it "tipsy" when the "tipsy" people wore couture and drank on empty stomachs because society girls weren't fat.

Nate used this time to meet and sleep with a skinny brunette named Natasha at a club. She was a very interesting girl, and he would have said not very bright except that she had several talents he couldn't quite equate with stupidity. She also allegedly spoke French, which he supposed showed some culture, although the only thing he'd ever heard her say in it was "voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"

Blair would have been appalled, but Natasha seemed slightly confused by "oui," so Nate settled for "da," which both of them understood well enough.

She took him to parties where the shots were glasses and the pills were legal if anyone asked. (Nobody ever did.) They spent a lot of time drunk and hopelessly lost and laughing at the way the blacklights made their teeth turn colour, and more time having sex, and most of the time sleeping it off on somebody's kitchen floor. And overall, it killed brain cells and induced a lot of amnesia, which was the entire point.

It was also as far from high society as possible, and was it really any wonder...

And when he and Anne returned to Manhattan with an unspoken agreement that the entire Christmas escapade would remain unspoken about, Jenny's list had somehow acquired another ten names, and she looked like she hadn't slept in a week.

Nate would have been more concerned if he hadn't been suffering from a great deal of withdrawal from who-the-hell-knew-what.

"So, what did you do in Russia?" she asks, and he thinks that she's got to wear less makeup; he can't see her eyes and the smeary, half-rubbed eyeliner isn't helping.

"Pretty much what I do here," he replies, and he's lucky that Jenny is sleep-deprived, the way he's lying. But he thinks there's a little bit of venom in that look, and he reads it as jealousy. He sighs. "Got really drunk – come on, the only thing different about Russia is that there are Russian girls there."

Jenny looks like she's been expecting that. "Girls or girl?"

"What?"

"Just a question." It's not. "You know, that whole Chuck and what's-her-face from Europe thing, just wondering."

"It was like St. Patrick's Day this year, only two weeks long."

"So you had sex on the roof in a town of no esteem whatsoever."

"No, the roof part was with you."

"And you fell off, and then I realised you really weren't too good for Brooklyn, and nobody else would ever understand that."

He wonders how she can be such a bad influence and such a good one at the same time. "It doesn't matter."

"Maybe not to you, but it does to me."

Nate stares at her; he has the feeling that they're talking about different things. "...What do you want, Jenny?"

"You." So easily.

"...I'm jet-lagged."

"Me too, probably." She's more honest than him, sometimes. Jenny is never subtle, but when she is, it's authentic.

He suddenly notices how tired she looks. "Why don't you sleep?" He means it as a suggestion, but she takes it as a question.

"I can't." The answer's suitable either way.

* * *

New Year's Eve, and Serena has a bottle of wine and somebody else, just somebody. But she doesn't feel drunk enough yet, so there's a Scrabble board between them, because – well, she doesn't want to go there. She's compensating for Dan and the dorky board games are just a distraction, but the kind of distraction that only serves to remind her what she's trying to distract herself from. And she thinks that she just doesn't need that when he's spending New Year's with Vanessa and Nate is... she doesn't want to go there either. Serena must be at least tipsy – in the conventional sense, this time – because her highest scoring word is annotated "fox" (39 points, triple word score). He's watching her rearrange her tiles, and the way she's chewing her bottom lip, and he wonders what kind of a drunk she is, and whether she'll remember his name in the morning.

She raises her eyes, and smiles as she puts down a single letter. _S._

Fitting.

_"Extricates."_ She realises that whoever he is, he has to be smart if she can cheat off his progress that efficiently.

He raises an eyebrow, writes down the number 19, and Serena thinks that it's only as much of a shortcut as anything else in life.

* * *

And meanwhile, Chuck and Blair aren't looking for resolutions; they're holding tight to familiarity and each other while they pretend it's all part of a game.

They say you don't fix it if it isn't broken.

But what if it is?

Blair's laughing.

"You know, maybe you won't be such a bastard next year."

"Don't count on it."

They spend too much time together. She runs a finger over the salty rim of her margarita glass. "I hate tequila." She doesn't mind the taste, it's what it does to her. _Like him._

Damn, she's already tipsy if she's thinking like that.

Chuck shrugs. "I hate you, but I don't complain."

"I hate you, too."

"Happy New Year, bitch, aren't we supposed to kick our bad habits to the curb? That includes you."

Blair drops her glass and grabs him by the collar of his shirt. "I hate you so much I can't even describe it."

"Good," Chuck says, and he kisses her, but he does it gently because they're all liars unless they can stop talking.

There's comfort in familiarity.

* * *

_It's been a long December, and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last._


End file.
